My goodness we have been busy! We have just launched our Sydney Specific Merchandise pop up shop here in beautiful surry hills, and are enjoying the warmer, (if not a bit rainier) weather here in Sydney.
We had a fantastic opening party where we met some fantastic people, and I ate my body weight in cheesles washed down with a seductive companion of white wine. Specific Merchandise will be here for the next 2 and a half weeks, where we are featuring lovely new products, and giving free presents at random to daily visitors, with hefty doses of cheesles, and perhaps a glass or two of wine.
If you live anywhere near Sydney, stop in for a chat, and see works unseen in our Fitzroy store or on our website.
Third Drawer Down, Australia’s only museum of art souvenirs presents Specific Merchandise, a curated collection of popular culture and handmade design 24th July to the 13th August in conjunction with the Sydney Design Festival.
Specific Merchandise, smack-bang in the centre of Sydney’s design hub in Crown Street, will be the exclusive Australian Launch of New York’s Confetti Systems piñatas and party favours, hand held Japanese sculptures by Magma, and France’s Clémentine Henrion Helium Eternal Balloons.
For 21 days Sydneysiders can experience Third Drawer Down and our design thoughts from around the globe such as Great Big Stuff from the USA, Vik Prjonsdottir’s Icelandic woollens, Denmark’s AIAIAIA headphones, salty caramel chocolate by Brooklyn artisans Chocolate Editions, Art history prints from Serbia and beautiful handcrafted birdcalls from France.
It’s longer than a pop-up, but short enough that if you don’t hurry you’ll miss out.
Third Drawer Down x Specific Merchandise
Blank Space Gallery
374 Crown Street Surry Hills
July 24th-August 13th 2010
Opening hours 11-6 Tuesday-Sunday
Check out our friends, the really delightful and very cool Third Drawer Down in Melbourne, Australia. Third Drawer Down functions as a showroom, design studio, museum and retail space with objects either hand picked from various popular cultural contexts or made by Third Drawer Down for leading Museums around the world. Alongside issues of mono.kultur you can find wonderful things like these Kiki Smith pillowcases and this Fairy Tale in the Glass and this fabulous baby suit by Douglas Gordon and all these really great tea towels and this Ed Ruscha beach towel and this Giant Corn Cob Stool and heaps more!
Thanks Mono-Kultur. Check out the new issue Sissel Tolaas. Available at Third Drawer Down very soon – and be warned it smells disgusting!!!
In collaboration with Brazalian conceptual artist Rivane Neuenschwande and New Museum, Third Drawer Down managed the production of the work ‘I Wish You Wish’ 2003
*Ms. Neuenschwander draws from her country’s rich folk traditions. One of her best-known works “I Wish Your Wish,” first presented in 2003 — is derived from a tradition popular among pilgrims to the Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Bahia, who bind ribbons to their wrists or the church’s front gate in the belief that when the ribbons fall off or disintegrate, their wishes will be granted.
In Ms. Neuenschwander’s conceptual-art variation, which will be displayed at the rear of the New Museum’s lobby, colorful silk ribbons have each been stamped with one of 60 wishes left by previous viewers of the piece. The show’s visitors can take a ribbon from one of 10,296 small holes in the wall in exchange for scribbling a new wish on a slip of paper and inserting it into the hole. “When I was starting off, I was very interested in the ephemeral, in quotidian materials that disappear or are subject to entropy, which is how my art got stuck with labels like ‘ethereal materialism,’ ” she explained.* Text from New York Times
60,000 wishes were made up of 60 diffrerent wishes over 10 different colours were printed and hand cut with another 40,000 wishes over 10 different colours made half way through the exhibition.
It’s fun building a new space. Third Drawer Down will be launching a new space behind the curtained wall to represent some of our favourite international stores, brands and individual designers in the new CAVE space.
Here are a few images to give you an idea of the space. The builders are doing there hammer, nail and painting thing over the next week.
We will keep you posted over the next couple of weeks with the CAVE shop-shows….some really amazing folk indeed. Although we love travelling overseas, we have always dreamt of bringing the best stores and ideas locally. Apart from leaving a healthier carbon footprint by not having to fly across the world to experience these places, it also allows our local community to enjoy the world at their doorstep.
Yes, we will be opening shop somewhere else in Australia. Filling up a truck with our most exciting goodies and heading out of Melbourne. Where, why and how long you ask? Tell us!
The best answer will not only win a gift of their choosing, but will also be published in our tasty little newsletter. So get creative and tell us where you’d like us to go!
Though many poets have extolled the merits of sleep (and perchance dreams) as well as the delightful things one might do in bed, few have taken up bedding itself with the gusto of the 19th-century British poet and humorist Thomas Hood. In the poem “Her Dream” from the Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg cycle, Hood rhapsodizes not about the woman’s leg but about her velvet quilt (“A fit mantle for Night-Commanders”), her pillow (“as white as snow undimm’d”), and her pillowcase (“in the finest cambric, and trimm’d / With the costliest lace of Flanders”), before finally exclaiming: “O bed! O bed! Delicious bed / That heaven upon Earth to the weary head!”
And who hasn’t echoed Hood’s cry, casting down their fatigued bones and feeling that life affords few pleasures greater than the warm comfort of freshly laundered linens and a cozy bed? In that spirit, then, we take up the matter of bedclothes.
Choosing from among the modern morass of mercerized this and ten-million-thread-count that can be a vexing affair. But Sumru Krody, a curator at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, suggests that “natural dyes tend to be more stable than synthetic ones and stand up better to washing, as do natural fibers like cotton and linen.” She’s also onboard the thread-count express, noting that “the more yarn you have per square inch, the more durable the textile.”
Once you’ve picked your thread count—–for cotton aim for the 300 to 500 realm; jersey, which is knit, and linen aren’t measured in those terms—–it’s largely personal taste from there on out. With regard to the healthful benefits of bedding, Dr. Clete Kushida, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, reports that “there is no evidence that one bedding is superior to another,” but notes that the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, where he works, does make use of “premium cotton sheets.”
Our picks range from exuberant bursts of Marimekko color for the after-hours maximalist to Unison’s understated pinstripes for those who prefer their beds as bastions of soporific calm. And though the duvet cover from Third Drawer Down is soft as can be, artist Ed Templeton’s design is razor-sharp. So whether you like your bedding witty, whimsical, or whitewashed, this assortment of modern sheets and duvet covers will have you composing ballads each night as flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
We love the simple pleasures, so a lemonade stand seems like the perfect disguise for our annual Third Drawer Down sale of out of edition, end of run, sample, seconds and hidden treasure stock that doesn’t make it to our shop front.
LEMONADE AND ART SAMPLES STARTING AT $2.00
LEMONADE AND ART STAND HOURS:
12.00 to 4.00 every sunny Saturday possible starting this weekend (24/04/10)
NORMAL HOURS for the rest of the store
TUES – SAT 11am - 5pm
ONLINE:
24/7
On May 1st, 2010 Third Drawer Down and Brooklyn Museum will be launching a new special limited edition by Kiki Smith in conjunction with her solo exhibition ‘Sojourn’ at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum in New York.
We have been huge fans of Kiki Smith for many years, and are so delighted to be working with her on this textile project titled ‘Tree with Light and Singing Birds’.
Tree with Light and Singing Birds
Material: 100% Cotton Pillowcase Set with hand screenprinting, embroidery and glitter
Edition: 1000
Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany) is an artist of international prominence whose career has spanned over three decades. She is a leading figure among artists addressing philosophical, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature. Since 1982, Smith’s work has been exhibited in nearly 150 solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide. Her work has also been featured in hundreds of significant group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, New York (1991, 1993, 2002); La Biennale di Firenze, Florence, Italy (1996-1997; 1998); and La Biennale di Venezia (1993, 1999, 2005, 2009).
Kiki Smith: Sojourn, which explores a woman’s life from birth to death, recently opened at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum in New York, where it will be on view through September 12, 2010. This is the final venue of the exhibition, after having travelled to three other museums internationally. Kiki Smith: I Myself Have Seen It is also currently on view (through August 15, 2010), at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. Other important recent exhibitions include Kiki Smith: A Gathering, a major retrospective organized by The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, which travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Whitney Museum of American Art; and La Colección Jumex, Mexico City (2005-2007) and Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things, mounted by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2003. Smith installed Homespun Tales: a tale of domestic occupation at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, a museum house in Venice, Italy, during the 2005 Venice Biennale.
The Museum at Eldridge Street recently commissioned Smith and architect Deborah Gans to create a new monumental east window for the 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue, a National Historic Landmark located on New York’s Lower East Side. The design, a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament, recreates in stained-glass the blue and gold star pattern painted on the walls immediately surrounding the new window. This permanent commission marks the final significant component of the Museum’s 20-year restoration and will be unveiled in late spring of 2010.
Kiki Smith’s work is part of more than 40 significant public collections worldwide, including Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; Art Institute of Chicago; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Gallery, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
This year, Smith was the recipient of the Theo Westenberger Women of Excellence Award, as well as the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award from Purchase College’s School of the Arts. Other accolades include the Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum (2009), the 50th Edward MacDowell Medal (2009), the Medal Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006), the Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2006), and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2000). Smith was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, in 2005.
Kiki Smith lives and works in New York City. She has been represented by PaceWildenstein since 1994, and her new stained glass work will be the subject of her next exhibition at the gallery’s 22nd Street location from March 26 to May 1, 2010.
